Longing For Desert

People in Hong Kong have short memories. Last week it rained a bit. I think it started Monday. By Tuesday it was all “oh, I’m so SICK of this RAIN! Will it EVER stop?” Interestingly, →

Author’s Plight

酒！ Jau! Wine! As they call it. It’s actually a deadly spirit so vile that it should only be used for paint stripping and permanently disfiguring your enemies. Strangely, the (mainland) Chinese drink it with →

Girlie Morning in Nature

Are spiders actually really stupid? I mean they can spin these beautiful webs, masterpieces of engineering and all that, but are they a bit dim all the same? This morning I had the first proper →

More About That! 嗰

嗰個人係四川人 (go go yan hai Sei Chyun yan – that piece person is Four River person, that person is from Sichuan) 嗰個人 (go go yan – that piece person). That should be pretty plain sailing →

飲茶 The Civilised Lunch

I’ve just travelled 25 minutes there and 25 back just to eat. What, didn’t I have perfectly good ingredients for Sichuan food in my fridge? you ask. Yes, of course. But no matter how good →

Its Name Was Amber, It Was A Vomit…

Do you see that lake? That was a green and throbbing grassland only yesterday. Surely this must be an amber rainstorm? 黃色暴雨 (wong sek bou yu – yellow colour violent rain)(That’s right! The surname Wong →

Transformation Continues on All Levels 2

Is Cantonese dying? Last weekend’s visit to Guangzhou was quite depressing in many ways. It’s nothing new that people from all over China migrate to Guangdong province, especially Shenzhen and Guangzhou, to make something of →

Transformation Continues On All Levels 1

Guangzhou used to be my favourite city with its leafy streets, car-less alleys and languidly flowing river whose name, Pearl, also gave itself to an excellent beer, 珠江啤酒 (jyu gong beh jau – Pearl River →

Good Weather Likely

A lovely day has begun in the lovely city of Guangzhou and after yesterday’s torrential rain people are pouring out in the streets again. Just outside the hotel I saw this guy relaxing with a →

Owner Of A Broken Face

I’ve finally finished the last chapter (or recipe) in my Sichuan cookery book, a book that isn’t really a book, for can it be a book when it’s only online? If not, what should it →

Love Craft Beer? Love Buffaloes? Come to Pui O!

Interview with Chris Riley, owner of the excellent Water Buffalo restaurant in Pui O. Now you don’t have to travel to Inner Lancashire to experience real English food, and ale, and pale brewish ale and →

Bunk Demythed! I Mean Myth Debunked!

Last weekend a group of three ecstatic revellers hopped on the ferry to Jung Saan (Zhongshan) and got straight in a taxi at the ferry pier and darted into the hinterland. In the lovely, slightly →

Guangdong Province! The Best Province with the Best People. It’s Yuge!

Guangdong is the best province in China, and not because of Cantonese! It’s got the friendliest people and the best hovelage. And today I’m off to savour her charms again! I just thought I’d share →

Wild Shenzhen Extravaganza

I always have a good time in Shenzhen’s famed Lo Wu Shopping Centre, even after several hours of “missy missy looking, you buy sunglass okay.” Still, I could really do with less nagging. My student →

Different For Chinese

As I was looking through my old columns from South China Morning Post trying to get some other newspaper gigs (do newspapers even exist anymore?) I found the above story from Norway. Allowed only 450 →

CantoNews Live from the Throbbing Metropolis of Mui Wo

Nick (a.k.a. Cassette) and I go to an Italian restaurant in the throbbing metropolis of Mui Wo, centre of the universe and make a programme about lots of interesting things – specifically the idiotic spelling →

How Now, Guangdong Prov?

I’m just about to write my last column ever for South China Morning Post; ever! When I was told the page would be discontinued, I was so sad. How now would I be able to →

FINALLY!!!!

Ohhh this has been a long time coming! I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing Naked Cantonese and ah-Sa (mine co-host of yore) before I started to make podcasts – properly – again only →

Last Word About the Worst Flu Ever.

Have you had it? Who hasn’t? Shitty province. But I kind of love it!

Most of my live Cantonese sessions are done in the venerable Honolulu Coffee and Cake Shop, one of the last proper cha chanteng in Central. The last venue (see film above), whose name I can’t →

Long Live the Entrepreneurial Spirit! And Beer!

I can’t control myself – I must show it: Mister Public Security Uncle photographed by a professional photographer! It was the night before Halloween and I was strolling around Central with my vice-Security officer, Bak →

Finally!!!! CantoNews, Cantonese Podcast For Lantau People, By Lantau People!

Woo-hoo! Finally there’s a podcast dealing only with Lantau issues, made by Lantau people like Carina (ah-Lin) (above) Rudolf (ah-Dak) and Tony (ah-Lei). OK, I admit it. I was planning on podcasts of five minutes →

Sichuan Province, Sichuan Food

Here’s a gaff in my favourite village in all of China, Chuanxing 川興 (Chuen Heng) near famous satellite centre Xichang 西昌 (Sai Cheung) where the moon is rounder and brighter than in the rest of →

SUNDAY: Reasons to Learn Cantonese #11

The other day I made a list of the ten most important reasons, off the top of my head, to learn Cantonese.  Yesterday I found another one. I am a Luddite whose phone, a Nokia →

Devil Festival!

What a night! Friday October 30th in Lan Kwai Fong, squeezed by hordes but in a mostly good way. We went out on a mission to spread the word of Cantonese, by force if necessary, →

Vexed No More!

This is the kind of joke I like. Clean, but not without teeth! Talking about vexed – the word for angry in Cantonese is 嬲 (lao). The character shows one woman between two men, so →

川菜 Sichuan Food, Best On Earth

It’s Sunday morning and I just finished doing the dishes from yesterday’s Sichuan food blowout extravaganza wonder party. Chilli oil tastes wonderful but is a bugger to get off plates and worktops. But it’s worth →

Lasi One

Here is my fine hound Lasi, rocking the look with a handmade collar from Ciao Puppy. When I named her Lasi, it was meant as a knowing pun. In Cantonese, La Si (拉士) comes from →

Cabin Fever

Rain, rain and I’m stuck in my office writing a book. I like books, I like writing, but I don’t like being stuck! In times like these, my thoughts inevitably turn to travelling, especially thundering →

Let’s Meat, You Cow

I’m fortunate enough to live in a place with water buffalo all around. This morning when I took my dogs for a walk, I reflected on how the rain makes the water buffalo 水牛 (seoi →

Children Outside Society

Last night I shared a taxi from Tung Chung – oh how it pains me to spell it that way when it’s pronounced DUNG Chung – with a boy and his domestic helper. I noticed him at the taxi stand calling for a taxi in beautiful, cut-glass British English, and quickly wormed my way into that taxi deal. (I paid $50 though – hello!)

We got chatting and he told me he was 11, spent four hours going to school and back every day, had been born in Hong Kong and, of course I have to say, didn’t speak a single word of Cantonese.

Where else can children be born somewhere and not know a word of the local language? Mainland China, that’s where; not speaking to your children in your own language is the latest craze there. If that language isn’t imperialist Mandarin, naturally.

Which, in fact, my taxi gentleman was also learning. As are tens or hundreds of thousands of other kids, expat and Chinese, in this town. Local language: Bad! A completely different language enforced by a communist dictatorship: Good! Power doesn’t come out of the barrel of a gun in China anymore, it comes out of the mouths of babes.

The boy had been learning Mandarin for five years. And I can’t be sure if he was particularly obtuse; he certainly seemed very bright, but I suspect this is symptomatic of language teaching in Hong Kong: After five years of training, according to him, he could say “ni hao” and count to ten, as well as some other words. But he couldn’t make up a sentence.

So that’s the way Hong Kong prepares children to live in a society. They have to learn fluently two sentences of the language of a country they may visit twice a year in some distant future and whose every inhabitant is studying English 24/7 with the purpose of actually learning it. But make them able to talk to a taxi driver or a taxi central, perhaps even go shopping in the market, in the place they live? No no no.

香港 (Heung Gong – Incense Harbour/Hong Kong)
國語 (Gok yu – Mandarin)
的士司機 (Dek si si gei – taxi driver)